I have been having a lot of fun with Parks on the Air (POTA) activations this summer. As I’ve been operating, I’ve been jotting down some random thoughts. Here are a few of them:
- My operations are encouraging me to finally learn about antenna modeling. The reason for this is that I don’t think that I’m doing as well as I should on 20 meters. I’m thinking that’s because I’m using a 66-ft., i.e. a full-wave, doublet in an inverted-V configuration and that might have some weird antenna pattern. Perhaps if I modeled the antenna, and could get an idea of the pattern, I could orient it in some way that will give me better result. That, or just come up with some other 20-meter antenna.
- It occurred to me after working a few slower-speed ops on my last activation that POTA is encouraging new hams to take up CW. It’s a fixed format, so that makes the contact easier to make, most POTA contacts are relatively slow-speed contacts, and it’s overall a pretty laid-back kind of thing. I got some confirmation of this feeling this morning in the Long Island CW Club mailing list digest. In his email, Jim, N3JLN, wrote:
Made my first CW contact today! I was a POTA hunter. Thanks to activator N2VGA for putting up with my mistakes and ridiculously slow speed. With the POTA website I was able to predict what I should be hearing and eventually get to the point I could make out his callsign and the response I should be giving.
- This begs the question of what is the optimal speed for POTA contacts. I have been calling CQ at 17 or 18 wpm, then slowing down if need be. I think that works pretty well. Maybe I’ll try calling CQ slower from time to time to see if that gets more people to call me.
- I’m thinking of making up a list of frequently-worked callsigns and names. That way I could personalize the contact a little. Several ops already do this, so I don’t think i’m out in left field on this.
- I worked my first POTA DX a couple of activations ago. 15 meters was open to Europe, and I had an Italian and a Swede call me. Both had strong signals. I didn’t have quite so much luck on 15 meters last time, though.
- I had some weird RFI when operating 20 meters last Friday. Somehow, something was getting into the little external speaker that I plug into the KX-3. When I unplugged the speaker and plugged in my headphones, the noise went away.
- This last thought I’m not quite sure about. I’m thinking that one feature that the POTA folks might add to pota.app is messaging. It might be nice to message other folks that are logged into the website. As I say, I’m not 100% sure about this idea, though.
Please let me know what ideas you might have had while activating parks or hunting activators.